It’s been a while since I’ve been excited by a Kodi skin. A couple of my past favorites were Aeon Nox and then Arctic Zephr. I wrote about them in my post, The Best Kodi Skins of 2018 (for Streaming Add-ons).
As I mentioned on that post, one of biggest things I look for in a skin is the ability to create widgets on the home screen. With home screen widgets, you can find screens buried deep in the folder structure of streaming add-ons and seamlessly display them on the home screen.
This new Kodi skin called “Aura” does widgets really well. Not only can you add several rows of widgets onto any menu item on your home screen, but it also has a nice submenu / categories feature, and to top it all off, it looks really nice!
First, let me give you a tour of the Aura Kodi skin, and then I’ll show you how you can install it.
Aura Kodi Skin Tour
I’ve configured my main menu items, submenus/categories, and widgets in a way that works for me. Of course, you can customize it to your liking.
Here’s my add-ons screen.
The main menu item here called “Add-ons” is actually a shortcut to the Add-on Browser which is super convenient since I spend a lot of time there installing and testing new add-ons.
The submenu / categories under Add-ons are the different types of add-ons.
I have a widget for each type of add-on so I can browse all my add-ons from the one screen.
Now, here’s my TV Shows screen. My goal for this was to bring forward my most commonly access streaming add-on screens.
At the time of writing this, I’m primarily using Exodus Redux (but that changes fairly frequently). This would apply to any Kodi streaming add-on.
The first widget is the “New Episodes” screen from within Exodus Redux which shows the next episodes from TV Shows in my Trakt collection. The above screenshot shows it in “Landscape” thumbnail mode.
But you can actually change the thumbnail mode for each widget individually, so here’s what it looks like when I switch it to “Poster“…
The next widget you see in these screenshots is Exodus Redux – TV Show Lists. Again, this is powered by Trakt integration. These are the three “lists” where I’ve added shows. It’s very convenient to have these three lists easily accessible from the home screen.
My third widget on the TV Shows screen is a list of live TV channels from the Maverick TV add-on (which seems to be working better than Mobdro at this time).
In case you’re curious, I pointed this widget to Add-ons > Video add-ons > Maverick TV > Maverick Live TV > Live TV > US TV
Note: by default, this skin only shows the first 10 items in any widget, but in the Skin Settings, you can increase it. I had to increase it in order to see all the channels.
Here is what the Main Menu Skin settings area looks like. It’s very much like Arctic Zephr. Note, to get to the widgets, you need to be on the right side and hit the right arrow. To go back, hit the close button at the bottom.
Here’s what the main settings area looks like when it’s configured with the default Settings widget.
Now, what about the rest of the skin? It looks awesome! Plus, there’s several views to choose from. Here’s “Landscape“…
Here’s “Episode List“…
… just to name a couple.
Give the Aura skin a try on your Kodi.
How to Install the Aura Kodi Skin
Unfortunately, Aura is still pre-release and hasn’t been included in any repositories for easy installation. So you would need to install it yourself using these instructions.
Go to jurialmunkey’s Aura Skin Github project page for Krypton or for Leia, and click the green “Clone or download” link, and the click “Download ZIP“.
Using Kodi
If you downloaded it on a browser on your Kodi device, then open Kodi, go to the Add-on Browser > Install from zip file, and then browse to the zip file that you downloaded.
Once installed, it will ask you if you want to switch to the Aura skin. Select “Yes“.
Using adbLink
If you don’t have an easily accessible browser, like if you have a Fire Stick and don’t want to mess with the browser, you can use adbLink on your computer. Some of you may already have adbLink installed from when you installed Kodi on your Fire Stick.
On your Fire TV Stick:
- Navigate to Settings > System > Developer Options and turn ON both options (Apps from Unknown Sources and ADB Debugging). Don’t forget to turn ADB Debugging OFF when you’re done, or you might get hacked.
- Find and take note of your Fire Stick’s IP address by going to Settings > System > About > Network.
On adbLink on your computer:
- Click the New button
- In Description, give your Fire TV Stick a name.
- In Address, type the IP address of your Fire TV Stick that you took note of earlier.
- Click the Save button.
- Click the Connect button, and you should see your Fire TV Stick’s IP show in the Connected Devices box.
- Then click the File Manager button.
- Navigate the left side to /sdcard/Downloads
- Click the “Push” button.
- Browse to and select the Aura Skin zip file that you downloaded on your computer.
Now, open Kodi on the Fire Stick, go to the Add-on Browser > Install from zip file, and then browse to the zip file that you pushed into the External Storage / Downloads folder.
Once installed, it will ask you if you want to switch to the Aura skin. Select “Yes“.
Let’s See Yours
Did you feel inspired to use Aura to suit your taste? Share a screenshot of your home screen using Aura! Hint: use Ctrl + S in Kodi to save a screenshot.
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